Osiyo~

This week in my spirit stories I’m sharing the miraculous birth of my first born.

I’ll start at her very beginning. In October 1983 I got pregnant. Hubby and I lived with my mother at the time in Washington state. Right off I had severe morning sickness. I still have no clue why they call it ‘morning’ sick because I was sick from early afternoon past bedtime every freaking day for three months!

When I was three months pregnant I had what my OB doctor called a partial separation of the placenta. “Thank goodness. I thought I was having a miscarriage!” was my response to his diagnoses of the bleeding. He informed me that that was the beginning of a miscarriage. Meaning that the placenta was trying to separate from my uterine wall. GULP. I was put on bed rest and told to take it easy the remainder of the pregnancy. All six more months. Not bed rest for the whole time, but careful.

My mother’s boyfriend was bouncer at a bar and when I was four months along he had called one night and asked us to come over with Mom to play pool. Shortly after we arrived a regular customer pulled a gun and shot Don, the bullet narrowly missing my mother. I’d seen a shiny ‘something-I-thought-was-a-knife’ and she’d slid from her booth seat across from me to stand. The bullet was in the wall behind where her chest had been, not two feet from me. Hubby had leaned back to get a better view and the same bullet missed his neck because he had. Don lived, with no organ damage (he had a healthy beer belly!).

Then that same month my gramma had to have by-pass surgery across the country from us, in N Carolina. Mom went. That was the last time I saw Mom alive. Before she returned hubby and I decided to return to Oklahoma. At five months along we made the trip by Greyhound. Things went fairly well once we got settled in. Until my sixth month when my mother, a fairly healthy woman we thought, (having returned home by then) passed away unexpectedly one night at 46 years old.

Now you see the pattern? Every month from the time I got pregnant something dramatic happened. Oddly- after her death not one solitary incident happened again. The remaining three months went by smoothly. Until the night I went into labor and the car broke down half way to the hospital, that is, but that’s another blog post.

It was a party atmosphere in the delivery room. I was munching ice and listening to the anesthesiologist tell jokes while the doctor did things I wasn’t aware of *down there* and hubby looked on. It occurred to me suddenly that I was having a baby! Maybe I should push like those prenatal classes taught? The doctor welcomed me ‘to the birthing party’ when I did and told me to keep it up. DUH! That girl did not want to be born. The nurse asked if we had names chosen. Now that in itself was odd to me. I knew without a doubt (and without an ultrasound to prove it) that I was having a girl. I can’t explain it- I just knew. As if someone had told me.

After twelve hours of labor the doctor armed with forceps delivered my leggy bundle of joy. We gave her the chosen names for each sex and the instant my daughter was born the nurse yelled- loud!- not that it was a girl, but that “It’s Calais!”

27 years later

The nurses did their stuff and, along with hubby, ran from the room to show off my baby. I didn’t get so much as a glimpse of a toe before they took her out to show the family! Not a hair. I was put in recovery, the baby in the nursery. Five hours later I woke up and asked to see my baby for the first time.

When the nurse brought Calais to me I realized I had already seen her, studied her face, knew every detail of her tiny face. Yet, I’d never laid eyes on her. How? Before I woke I had a ‘dream’. A visit- from my mother. She hadn’t spoken, simply smiled and showed pride in her face. She held my baby in her arms and showed her to me. Lots of thick black hair, tan complexion (from birth her Cherokee blood was evident, as you can see in this pic above, more than any of my three girls), long fingers… I knew she was mine by her appearance alone the instant I looked at her, without reading the name bands on her arm and foot.

I believe that’s why nothing else happened during my pregnancy after my mom died. She protected her first grandbaby from the other side in a way no one else could have. That was also the only time I saw my mother after her death. I’ve dreamed about my gramma, my dad- never of Mom. Not one dream. Just that ethereal hospital visit.

What about you? Do you get visits you can’t explain? Care to share?

Dodadagohvi~